The energy business needs a new paradigm
a white paper by Shaun Varga & Ross Laurie June 2017
We need a much better way to ‘do energy’, don’t we? Fossil fuels are dirty. Climate change is real. Nuclear power is dangerous. We need to waste less. We need to work out how to make renewable energy work. Properly work. And by the way, we will all be consuming more power, not less, in the coming decades – global demand for electricity is forecast to nearly double by 2050 .
Meanwhile solar and wind power are both generated on a feast or famine basis. It’s sunny/windy… or it’s not. This lumpy, unpredictable supply doesn’t match the ‘always on’ nature of demand. Industry and governments have expended huge efforts trying to figure out ways to shoehorn renewable energy into the existing power grid. These workarounds are not the answer. The answer is a completely new, alternative infrastructure – so alternative that this infrastructure won’t actually be a ‘grid’ at all. It will not replace the current grid – it will emerge alongside it. We will build it by smashing together two old industries; energy and automotive – and two new technologies; blockchain and fog computing. The unexpected collision of technologies and concepts that already exist, reframed and repurposed, creates something truly revolutionary.